When printing a image, solid or phase change inks that are solid at ambient temperatures and liquid at elevated operating temperatures are currently utilized in conventional printers. The printers eject fluid, e.g., liquid phase ink droplets from the print head, at an elevated operating temperature. The droplets solidify quickly upon contact with the surface of a receiving medium to form a predetermined pattern or image.
When forming an image on a medium, e.g., printing on a piece of paper by forming an image on a drum and transferring the image to paper. Printing is typically performed using Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black ink (CMYK). where any combination of these four printer primary ink colors may be marked at any pixel location. The number of ink colors a printer uses is also referred to as the printer's number of color channels.
The quality of the image is generally limited by the drop size that the printer can produce. The drop size of the fluid and dot gain is usually a limiting factor determining the maximum practical addressability of a printer. With conventional CMYK printing systems, dots of secondary colors are usually printed with twice the ink of primary colors. Thus, because more ink is printed with secondary colors, more dot gain may occur when printing a secondary color than when printing a primary color. Furthermore, dot gain from the printed secondary colors spilling into adjacent unoccupied paper white areas may cause problems with the printed image.
One method of reducing dot gain ejects clear or white ink on unoccupied white areas next to printed non-white pixels. However, this method does not address problems associated with each marked pixel receiving a different amount of fluid which contributes to non-uniform dot gain. If the dot gain is significantly reduced, then much higher resolutions of an image may be possible in the final printed product.